Snitch or hero: Modern whistleblowers still aren’t getting much respect

As the world wrestles with the hero-or-traitor conundrum posed by ex-CIA technician Edward Snowden and his bombshell revelations about U.S. government surveillance of citizens’ email and phone traffic, longtime promoters of the whistle-blowing movement — a now-global phenomenon launched by American political activist Ralph Nader in 1971 — are defending the informant ethic as a noble instinct and a crucial check on corruption, corporate malfeasance, excessive secrecy and other abuses of power in modern democracies.

But where some see personal courage and a sterling sense of civic duty on display in the secrecy breach at the U.S. National Security Agency, critics of whistleblowers such as Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier now on trial for his massive leak of classified American diplomatic dispatches, instead see a betrayal of trust, reckless glory-seeking and even the aiding of terrorists and other “enemies of the state.”

In the four decades since they emerged as a significant force in North American political culture, whistleblowers have been at the heart of a complex and ever-evolving love-hate relationship with governments, corporations, media organizations and the public. While often hailed as crusaders for truth and accountability, some would-be whistleblowers have also been dismissed as conspiratorial cranks, company turncoats or unpatriotic “snitches.”

Fox News, for example, tapped a former senior FBI criminal profiler for her thoughts about Snowden’s possible state of mind. Mary Ellen O’Toole, a specialist in “psychopathy,” highlighted Snowden’s “flamboyant” media strategy in revealing the U.S. surveillance program and his own identity. She suggested that “some of the motivation here seems to be getting the attention and notoriety,” adding that while Snowden “has a sense of arrogance about him,” he “didn’t finish high school, he didn’t finish community college, he didn’t make it through (army) special forces (training)…. You have a litany of things he failed at.”

The portrayal of Snowden as failed man with an eccentric, “pole-dancing” girlfriend conforms to a common pattern of critics attempting to discredit whistleblowers on personal grounds, said David Hutton, executive director of Ottawa-based whistleblower advocacy group FAIR — Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform.

“There is a myth out there of the ‘ugly whistleblower’ — the irresponsible, self-interested, unreliable, disgruntled employee with bad motives,” Hutton told Postmedia News. “Part of the reason that myth persists, and leaves people with a doubt in their mind, is because every time there’s a high-profile situation, you get almost the exact same character attacks on the person.”

But years of research, he said, indicates that whistleblowers are “much more likely to be high performers, people who are respected by their colleagues. Only a tiny, tiny minority ever go to the media, even when everything else has failed … They mostly use all the channels available to them in the belief or the hope that the organization will recognize the problem and fix it.”

Conscious of the ambivalent attitudes surrounding those who raise red flags about alleged corporate or government wrongdoing, it was Nader — the U.S. consumer advocate gained fame in the 1960s by exposing a series of safety scandals in the North American auto industry — who sought to rebrand whistle-blowing as unambiguously virtuous, an indispensable service to society provided by conscience-driven individuals choosing to confront the excesses and abuses of state or corporate power.

If somebody has some information that is critical to your rights and freedoms, do you want to be bogged down in a debate about whether the whistleblower had too many drinks, or whether he slept with one too many girls in his life?

In his keynote address at the January 1971 Conference on Professional Responsibility, held at Washington, D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel, Nader — his dark-horse campaigns for the U.S. presidency still decades away — stated that the “key question” for whistleblowers is this: “At what point should an employee resolve that allegiance to society must supersede allegiance to the organization’s policies, then act on that resolve by informing outsiders or legal authorities?”

Nader’s aim to “institutionalize whistle-blowing,” as one biographer has put it, prompted opponents to slam what they called Nader’s “fink tank” and led General Motors executive James Roche to equate whistle-blowing with “industrial espionage”: some “enemies of business,” he said at the time, “now encourage an employee to be disloyal to the enterprise.”

But whistle-blowing went on to become a fixture of civic affairs in North America and beyond, with national and sub-national governments increasingly likely to respond to exposed abuses and to implement rules aimed at protecting legitimate whistleblowers from reprisals.

In Canada, notable whistleblowers have included former Public Works employee Allan Cutler, whose disclosures about misspent federal funds in Quebec following the 1995 sovereignty referendum triggered the Sponsorship Scandal, sealing the collapse of the Liberals and the rise of the Conservatives in the 2006 general election.

Snowden, the 29-year-old, ex-CIA data specialist at the centre of the current whistle-blowing storm in the U.S., detailed the secret American surveillance system through Britain’s Guardian newspaper and went into hiding in Hong Kong before making his public disclosures.

“Over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it,” Snowden told the Guardian, describing how his dawning comprehension of the vast scope of the NSA’s “architecture of oppression” finally led him to become a whistleblower. “And the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told its not a problem — until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

Snowden’s employer, Virginia-based security consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, swiftly fired him and described his alleged actions as “shocking, and if accurate … a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.”

A criminal investigation has been launched and top American officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, have condemned Snowden’s actions as criminal and treasonous.

“He’s a traitor,” said Rep. John Boehner, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. “The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it’s a giant violation of the law.”

A more tempered interpretation by New York Times editorialists has argued otherwise, but concluded that Snowden “should brace himself for the charges and possible punishment” that could yet flow from his principled act of “civil disobedience” — with prosecutors likely to pursue him for an illegal “disclosure of classified information” under the U.S. Espionage Act, which could result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

“Mr. Snowden may well be going to jail for exposing practices that should never have been secret in the first place,” the Times opined, paradoxically.

Joanna Gualtieri, one of Canada’s best-known whistleblowers and now a leading North American advocate of protecting those who spill government secrets to safeguard the public interest, said Snowden’s harshest critics are following a “very typical” pattern of “smearing the whistleblower” in a way that “deflects entirely from the real issue” of over-the-top state snooping into Americans’ private lives.

“If somebody has some information that is critical to your rights and freedoms, do you want to be bogged down in a debate about whether the whistleblower had too many drinks, or whether he slept with one too many girls in his life?” Gualtieri told Postmedia News. “Do you want the information that is critical to your well-being, or engage in a salacious smear campaign against the whistleblower? The ultimate issue is the integrity of the information that he discloses.”

She added: “In the surveillance state, which is what this is all about, the new enemy is the whistleblower.”

Gualtieri, a lawyer and former public servant at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, waged a career-destroying, health-shattering, 18-year battle to expose abusive spending practices at Canadian embassies abroad — abuses that were later confirmed by formal audits. A workplace harassment suit that she launched in connection with her whistleblowing efforts was finally settled in 2010.

Gualtieri went on to found FAIR. And extending her influence to the U.S., she also serves as chair of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, the leading American promoter of whistle-blowing and lobbyist for stronger legislation to protect public-sector employees who expose wrongdoing in their organizations.

Like Gualtieri, Cutler has become an advocate for whistleblowers, founding the group Canadians for Accountability in 2008. Former military intelligence officer Sean Bruyea, a whistleblower who exposed privacy breaches and other questionable actions at Veterans Affairs Canada, serves as a vice-president of Cutler’s Ottawa-based organization.

FAIR, Canadians for Accountability and another Ottawa-based citizen-advocacy group, Democracy Watch, have criticized the act as too full of loopholes to adequately protect whistleblowers, and characterized the federal Integrity Commissioner — the supposed bastion of whistleblower protection in Canada — as a largely toothless watchdog on government waste and corruption.

And as in the U.S., members of the military and employees of government security agencies are not shielded by standard whistleblower-protection measures — however inadequate those may be anyway, according to critics.

Gualtieri acknowledges the need to weigh the merits of whistleblowers disclosing sensitive information against other imperatives, such as national security.

“One has to be balanced in these situations,” she said, and to avoid “a knee-jerk reaction to say that all disclosures are good,” just as much as “a knee-jerk reaction to decimate the whistleblower.”

Even though Snowden has shed light on a surveillance system that exposes “the tyranny of the state,” she said, he faces a situation in which it is “going to be almost impossible to be fully protected because of the nature of the disclosure.”

She said he will need to “build alliances with the political class, with the public media, because ultimately, the constituency that is going to save you is the people.”

Snowden, Gualtieri argued, has “lit a fire under an issue that needs to be had. In any major shift in socio-political thinking, there have been people who have been very bold. This sort of thing doesn’t happen with tentative, let’s-sit-down-and-have-tea conversations. This takes a bold person.”

Whistleblowers in Canada and the U.S., though, continue to get mixed messages about whether they should stick their necks out to expose serious wrongdoing, said Hutton.

“The White House actually co-operated in getting through the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act a few months ago, which is a significant step forward, and which would seem to indicate good faith,” he said. “But at the same time you’ve got this absurd war going on against security whistleblowers.”

Hutton said history shows, “over and over and over,” that organizations “able to operate in secret are very prone to abuse of power, and corruption, and just going completely off the rails.”

What society needs, he said, is effective oversight of such agencies — “and at the moment, it’s the whistleblowers who are coming closest to doing that.”